Talk about an all-star cast. Bernanke will be appearing with Larry Summers, Ken Rogoff of Harvard and Israeli Central Banker Stanley Fischer. The video for the IMF conference hasn’t kicked in, so stand by!

He said both crises had a trigger that spread uncertainty, fire sales when investors panicked, followed by liquidity provision from the private or public sector followed by the slow restoration of confidence.

Mark Williams, a former Fed bank examiner, called Dudley’s remarks “remarkable and aggressive.”

“What’s very interesting is, this is a conservative organization,” said Williams, who is now at Boston University. “And it’s clear with these comments that the Fed is saying, ‘We are now actually going to aggressively police and regulate the banks,’ which is something that the Fed probably didn’t do a good job of for the last decade.”

Fischer defends Europe’s relatively slow pace of restoring their banks to health They’re not moving slowly given the situation they are in, he said. But at the same time, he urges European leaders to move faster.

Are we better equiped for the next crisis? Fischer asks. It is hard to know for sure, he concludes. Only reality will give you the full stress-test, but some stress-test exercises will help. You can’t just stress-test the banks, you will have to stress-test the regulatory system.

Policymakers wanted to help homeowners who were underwater on their mortgages, Summers said. Everyone in the White House got the problem. But it would not have helped people who were current on their mortgage or who never bought in the first place and the risk was that policy would give people incentive to stop paying on their mortgages. There might have been better ways to do what was done, Summers said. But it wasn’t stupidity or venality, he said.

Summers said he was worried that the new equilibrium interest rate has fallen below zero.

This might explain the sluggish growth over the past five years.

The Fed can’t do quantitative easing forever, he noted.

“We may well need, in the years ahead, to think about how we managean economy in which the zero nominal interest rate is a chronic and systemic inhibitor of economic activity holding our economy back,” Summers said.

Sorry that took awhile. Wonder if any member of the Senate Banking Committee will ask Janet Yellen that question at her nomination hearing next Thursday.

Bernanke called Summers’ remark “a fascinating comment.” The Fed chairman said that there is a theory that the real interest rates could not be negative indefinitely.

Would the fiscal side would be an approach to help the economy? Bernanke said.